The electrical fly tying vise, surprisingly, sold quite quickly on eBay. I thought it would be a stretch, but it sold to a woman in Boise, without a best offer, at $60 with additional for postage. I also sold a tying table on eBay for about $40. Add it all together, that's about $232 in sales for the week, which is still below where we need to be, but closer.
Sunday was spent in Boise. We bought blinds for the bunny-room window, and our bedroom. Monday was spent on the South Fork.
I was completely skunked, but that's not surprising. I haven't quite figured out how to fish the South Fork. Those that fish it most during the summer, do so from a drift boat, but that really means a "fishing buddy," someone to man the oars of the boat while I fish, and vice versa. If I'm honest with myself, I really don't like fishing with someone else -- the possible exception being Lora -- and I'm sure people pick that up. For me, catching fish is the pretext for being on the river, the point of which is not so much social, but spiritual. A real "fishing buddy" would need to be something of a soul mate, and I doubt that it's possible to find that in a male friend at this point in my life. I could go on about finding someone who shares my "deeper values" and the like, but I'd start to sound a bit like an eHarmony commercial and creep myself out. Most of the language that surrounds human connection has been cheapened, some commercially, some through pop-psyc analysis, some from over use, including the cliched words "soul mate," but there are few other words available to point at the experience of a deeper human connection.
Also, if I'm honest with myself, I really don't like people much. I'm going to mangle the quotation, which I should attribute to Charles Schulz, but like Linus, I love mankind, it's people I can't stand. My biggest complaint is an endemic irony deficiency -- that is to say, it's a bit like snoring. I'm told I snore, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, but I can't hear it. Likewise, most (without doubt including me) cannot see the irony in their on words and actions. A related complaint is an equally endemic narcissism. When I say that Donald Trump, for example, exemplifies most of what is wrong with this country today (and yet seems to be leading in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination) I am referring to his irony deficient narcissism. He feels free, for example, to make the most disparaging remarks about others -- the controversy of late around his remarks about women a point in case -- but woe unto those that make disparaging remarks about him, that challenge his view of himself as a man of genius, a man who has it all figured out, because, well, look, he's very very rich. He'll tweet them to death.
The last two people who fished with me both suffered from a irony deficient narcissism. The one, from Salt Lake, was just an ass through and through. He was the husband of my wife's friend, and while he felt free to berate her one day when she suggested that social security was a part of our retirement plan. "So you'll be one who's living on the government dole, my tax dollars," he said, and went on to characterize "people like her who ..." Lora held her tongue, but she knew that he accepted money from his parents to make his house payment and send their daughter to private school. That pretty much put the kibosh on her friendship. The other, a local who grew up here in Mountain Home, took me out in his drift boat. Frankly, I like him well enough, and he spent most of him time on the boat rowing for me as she shouted casting instructions. He completely lacks filters, and says whatever crosses his mind, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't deal well with anything that challenged his view of himself as a "rock-star around here." I didn't feel the need to challenge it, and suspect it's been challenged enough as it is.
In the meantime, I haven't figured out how to fish the South Fork ...
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